


mimicry

by prayer-in-the-bone (waterlit)



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Angst, Arranged Marriage, F/M, Romance, Star-crossed, Unhappy Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-03
Updated: 2016-11-03
Packaged: 2018-08-28 20:38:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 579
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8462149
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/waterlit/pseuds/prayer-in-the-bone
Summary: The royal wedding pleases no one—not the Fire Lord, not the Fire Lady, and certainly not Katara.





	

The dawn comes quickly, cutting apart the night at its seams. At the rooster's crow, Katara opens her eyes and untangles herself from Zuko's embrace. The silken sheets fall away like the retreating tide, exposing their tangled limbs atop the red bedspread, and Katara slips away like a meandering river dancing towards the end of the known world.

"Stay," he says. His skin is grey beneath his blood-shot eyes.

"I can't," she says, wiping the sleep from her face.

She pulls on a slip and then her dress. The diaphanous material floats slowly down, all fairy dust and gossamer silk. There is a hint of the sunrise on the faraway horizon, a few wild dashes of orange against the tired sky.

"We could run away," he says, voice raspy.

"No, we can't, Zuko. This is the end," she says, and slips away into the shadows.

Zuko sits up, heartbroken and very nearly married, and rues the day he found himself lost in the labyrinth of politics and forced to bend to the will of his scheming ministers.

The royal wedding is held when the sun rules the sky at the brightest hour. The fire sages and nobles crowd the square, watching as the Fire Lord and his dark-haired, pale-skinned bride stand and wave from a balcony.

Neither of them are smiling.

Mai glares down at the assembled nobles and the general populace, a splash of nonchalance in her eyes. She pretends that marriage and the crown of the Fire Lady is everything she has ever hoped for. They are not.

In the locked casket of her unknowable heart, she yearns for freedom and wide fields and exhilarating rides through sandy deserts. She yearns for privacy away from the tiring Fire Nation noble women with their idle chatter; she yearns for simplicity far away from the treacherous Fire Palace where loyalty is easily bought and equally easily lost, where her every action will be scrutinised and criticised, where every shadow in the night might place a knife in her back.

Zuko clenches his jaw, trying to smile. He can't. He pretends that the royal marriage will be a happy and fertile one. He doesn't think it will be.

He wants something more than a woman—once a friend, once a lover, but no longer—shrinking away from him under the gilded, ancient canopy of the Fire Lord's marriage bed. He wants something more—a woman of fire (ironic, that she is born to the Water Tribes) who will aid him in his kingship even as she wears the dual crown of overseer of the royal place and queenly mother of the nation.

Katara watches from the edge of the square, pressing her lips together as the royal couple seals their marriage with the ceremonial kiss. Pain slices through her heart and tears flow unbidden.

She turns away, the hidden consort with nothing to her name, and rues the day she delivered her heart to the banished prince, rues the day she lost her head and kissed the sad, suffering boy in the icy wastes of the north.

She wonders what the coming years will bring. Heartache, a distant dulling of her heart, years of good and fulfilling work and a high cup of loneliness—or marriage to a good man, perhaps the Avatar himself, who still pines for her, and the robe of the loving wife and patient teacher, and above all, the hidden, gnawing ache of an empty heart?

**Author's Note:**

> First posted on FFN in Nov 2015.


End file.
